Published 5:55 am, Monday, June 6, 2016

No fancy set up, no pyrotechnics, the pop-punk band from Tinley Park, Ill. just wants to jam with thousands of its biggest fans on this year’s iteration of The Warped Tour.

“With our lives shows, we try to create a good energy - we want people jumping around and singing along - but we want fans to know that we are just like everyone else,” said Kyle Fasel, the band’s bassist and co-founder. “We want it to be like everyone is hanging out with the band. We don’t’ want to be portrayed as big rockers.”

The band might have trouble escaping the big-rocker label with its new album “The Home Inside My Head” being released on May 27 - less than a month away from the start of The Warped Tour.

The album is the second full-length album after “Maybe This Place is the Same and We’re Just Changing” was released in December of 2013 and reached as high as No. 24 on the Billboard top 200 albums chart. The band featured that album on the 2014 Warped Tour.

“We’ve come a long way in two years,” Fasel said. “We are pretty excited about this year’s Warped Tour. We are on the main stage, which is a huge honor. It’s something we all grew up dreaming of doing.”

Real Friends is comprised of Fasel, who mans the bass, guitarist Dave Knox, guitarist Eric Haines drummer Brian Blake and vocalist Dan Lambton. A variation of the band formed in the fall of 2010 and turned around its first EP in the spring of 2011, “This is Honesty.” Two years later the group had its first full length album out.

Real Friends’ latest effort comes with a more polished sound with lyrics that match the growing up the band has done in the last couple of years.

“I think a lot has changed since the first album,” Fasel said. “It’s just naturally part of the process. We have become better musicians than what we were in the past. There are techniques and sounds that we might not have been able to pull off or might not have thought to include in the past. That’s a big difference.”

Fans of the band should already be well acquainted with the new album despite it only being a little more than a week old. The band put out songs Colder Quicker, Mokena, Scared to be Alone and Mess ahead of the release.

In “The Home Inside my Head,” the lyrics are more grown up but the band keeps its straight forward style and speaks from the heart.

“We’ve always tried to be straight to the point lyrically,” Fasel said. “We’re not trying to write a top 40 hit - nothing against top 40 music. It’s just when we write a song, it’s genuine. We aren’t writing it to be the biggest song. We aren’t writing it just to be catchy. We want it to be something we mean and feel.”

The response to the new album has been mostly positive, Fasel said, and the group is excited to showcase it on The Warped Tour.

“The reception has been great,” Fasel said. “We put out those four songs and got a really good response from those. We were a little nervous when the record came out how the rest would be perceived but overall the response has been really good.”

The Warped Tour begins on June 24 in Dallas and will be at NRG Park in Houston on June 26.

This year’s version of The Warped Tour will feature a number of bands Real Friends grew up listening to such as Good Charlotte, New Found Glory, Less than Jake, Yellow Card and others who helped pave the way for the early days of pop-punk.

“We’re excited about the whole tour,” Fasel said. “A lot of the bands we listened to in high school or are big influences on us. We never expected for our band to become what is has. To be playing alongside those bands just adds to the excitement to the whole thing.”